08/29/2015

Here are two thousand years of London’s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar’s and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London.

08/26/2015

Long hours, 24/7 connectedness, and appearing busy have somehow and sadly become badges of honor for most Americans in the workplace, especially well-educated professionals. The result: stress, burnout, disillusion, etc. What happened? Tim Wu of Columbia Law School discusses.

"Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon. It revealed a workplace where abrupt firings are common, grown men and women cry at their desks, and people are scolded for not responding to e-mails after midnight. The story made clear how much things have changed in the American workforce. Once upon a time, it was taken for granted that the wealthier classes enjoyed a life of leisure on the backs of the proletariat. Today it is people in skilled trades who can most find reasonable hours coupled with good pay; the American professional is among those subject to humiliation and driven like a beast of burden.

"No one thought things would be this way. Keynes famously forecast a three-hour workday, and in 1964 Life magazine devoted a two-part series to what it considered a 'real threat' facing American society: the coming epidemic of too much leisure time. In The Emptiness of Too Much Leisure, it asserted that 'some of the middle-of-the-road prophets of what automation is doing to our economy think that we are on the verge of a 30-hour week.' The follow-up was entitled The Task Ahead: How to Take Life Easy."

08/22/2015

Dating back to the beginning of the first millennium, some of Rome’s most famous architectural sites are among the most ancient in the world. They survive in an enchanting urban tableau of classicism and modern Italian culture. Here are all of Rome’s most famous tourist attractions — the Coliseum, St. Peter’s Square, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps — represented in dozens of photographs, old and new, that bring the great city to life.

08/19/2015

Reread and finished just in time for a recent trip to Normandy to visit Caen and the landing beaches at Utah, Pointe du Hoc, Omaha, Sword, Juno, and Gold. Originally published in 1994 for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, Ambrose's D-Day June 6, 1944 is, in my opinion, still the best account of what has to be one of the proudest moments in our nation's history.

08/16/2015

The name Genghis Khan often conjures the image of a relentless, bloodthirsty barbarian on horseback leading a ruthless band of nomadic warriors in the looting of the civilized world. But the surprising truth is that Genghis Khan was a visionary leader whose conquests joined backward Europe with the flourishing cultures of Asia to trigger a global awakening, an unprecedented explosion of technologies, trade, and ideas. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford, the only Western scholar ever to be allowed into the Mongols’ “Great Taboo”—Genghis Khan’s homeland and forbidden burial site—tracks the astonishing story of Genghis Khan and his descendants, and their conquest and transformation of the world.

Fighting his way to power on the remote steppes of Mongolia, Genghis Khan developed revolutionary military strategies and weaponry that emphasized rapid attack and siege warfare, which he then brilliantly used to overwhelm opposing armies in Asia, break the back of the Islamic world, and render the armored knights of Europe obsolete. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongol army never numbered more than 100,000 warriors, yet it subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans conquered in four hundred. With an empire that stretched from Siberia to India, from Vietnam to Hungary, and from Korea to the Balkans, the Mongols dramatically redrew the map of the globe, connecting disparate kingdoms into a new world order.

But contrary to popular wisdom, Weatherford reveals that the Mongols were not just masters of conquest, but possessed a genius for progressive and benevolent rule. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination. Genghis Khan was an innovative leader, the first ruler in many conquered countries to put the power of law above his own power, encourage religious freedom, create public schools, grant diplomatic immunity, abolish torture, and institute free trade. The trade routes he created became lucrative pathways for commerce, but also for ideas, technologies, and expertise that transformed the way people lived. The Mongols introduced the first international paper currency and postal system and developed and spread revolutionary technologies like printing, the cannon, compass, and abacus. They took local foods and products like lemons, carrots, noodles, tea, rugs, playing cards, and pants and turned them into staples of life around the world. The Mongols were the architects of a new way of life at a pivotal time in history.

08/01/2015

A mildly interesting collection of fifty accounts of famous people who made it big in some field of excellence while holding down some other, more mundane job. Profiled here are the day and night jobs of Socrates, Isaac Newton, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Bram Stoker, C.S. Lewis, Julia Child, and others.

When we grow weary of defining ourselves in terms of our occupations, we can turn to historical examples of people who have managed to find fulfillment in two distinct worlds.